Automobiles have recently been transformed into environmentally friendly and advanced automobiles that incorporate IT technologies. In addition to development of automobile technology, intelligent automobiles are being commercialized where technologies like accident prevention, accident avoidance, crash safety, improved convenience, vehicle informatization, autonomous driving, etc. are applied.
Such an intelligent automobile is a vehicle that supports comfort functions through voice recognition and assistance for coping with distraction or misoperation by a driver, and that not only reduces accidents caused by the driver's negligence but also reduces time, fuel waste, exhaust gas, etc.
An autonomous vehicle is a collection of intelligent automobile technologies. When the driver enters the vehicle and inputs a desired destination, an optimal route from the present location to the destination is generated and the vehicle drives itself without any intervention from the driver.
In addition, the vehicle can recognize traffic lights and signs on roads, maintain proper speed according to the traffic flow, actively cope with possible accidents by recognizing dangerous situations, keep itself in lane, and if need be, can steer itself for lane-changing, obstacle avoiding, passing, etc. to reach the destination.
Meanwhile, the autonomous vehicle uses various sensors for detecting its driving environment, and these sensors are set to operate at all time regardless of the driving environment.
Accordingly, there is a problem in that even sensors unnecessary according to the driving environment at the moment are continuously operated, so that a large amount of power is consumed by the autonomous vehicle.
In order to solve such a problem, conventional methods adopt sensor fusion to use only optimal sensors necessary for detection of the driving environment.
Also, recently, although the autonomous vehicles can share information with one another over V2V communication, i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle communication, since a large amount of sensor data is transmitted and received, a large amount of communication resources is consumed, and since all the transmitted and received sensor data must be processed, consumption of computing resources is also huge.